8 Standout Films to See at This Year’s Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia

In 2012, Maori Karmael Holmes started the Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia to try to ensure a highly visible platform for independent black filmmakers from all over the world. The festival has since celebrated genre-defying, intensely personal films focusing on stories of the African diaspora and global indigenous communities, and has been attended by directors like Ava DuVernay—Holmes recently worked as a contributor at DuVernay’s film collective, Array—and Spike Lee.

Last year, the festival’s turnout rounded out at a cool 4,000 people, and organizers are expecting that number to increase this year over the four-day event, which promises a selection of ambitious, carefully curated films that together form a collective love letter to black narratives in 2018. Below, some of the highlights from this year’s festival:

Alaska Is a DragShaz Bennett’s darkly funny tale follows a drag performer in a small fishing town in Alaska who has learned to fight to survive—quite literally; he’s a boxer. When he meets a sparring partner who he has more in common with than he knows, he’s forced to rethink his path forward.

Black MotherA searing deep dive into the present-day Jamaican identity, from one of the directors behind Beyoncé’s Lemonade, as mapped out through three the trimesters of a woman’s pregnancy. Set to almost no music, the story—told through overlapping, multigenerational vignettes—is unflinchingly stark as it moves through the country’s turbulent history and into its present.

Douvan Jou Ka Leve + Four Days in MayA specific type of suffering goes under the microscope in this double feature, which begins with Gessica Geneus’s documentary Douvan Jou Ka Leve, in which the filmmaker explores the “illness of the soul” that is slowy killing the people of Haiti, as observed through the declining mental health of her own mother. Deborah A. Thomas, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and Deanne M. Bell’s Four Days in May blends archival film and photographs to take a look into the horrifying 2010 state of emergency in Kingston, Jamaica, when an armed drug cartel took control of the city for a period of three days, resulting in the deaths of at least 75 civilians.

Jinn“Maybe I was born in two bodies with one soul,” muses the star of Nijla Mu’min’s heartfelt debut feature, Jinn. “I cannot be bound.” Mu’min’s film captures the internal fissures of a young black adolescent girl whose identity is stretched between her vibrant, dance-loving, pepperoni-pizza-obsessed self and the expectations of her increasingly conservative mother, who is in the process of converting to Islam.

The Feeling of Being WatchedJournalist Assia Boundaoui sets out to investigate the rumors of FBI surveillance in her largely Arab-American neighborhood in Chicago. In the process, she discovers one of the largest probes conducted just before the 9/11 attacks.

French FriesCoproduced by Refinery29 and TNT, Janine Sherman Barrois’s short film about a foodie couple’s marriage uses various comestibles as a vehicle for talking about the real stuff: Sydney James is a “recovering foodie” and busy architect on deadline, who comes home to find her husband, Jason, having a raucous guys’ night with his friends. She soon escapes to a hotel to work in peace but is ultimately denied that—tail between his legs (and bags of treats over his arms), Jason comes to find her but meets her wrath instead.

Happy Birthday, Marsha!The life of iconic transgender artist and activist Marsha P. Johnson and her time in the hours before the Stonewall riots in 1960s New York is examined in Happy Birthday, Marsha!, which stars Mya Taylor as Johnson and intercuts real-life footage with its own.

Hair WolfCultural appropriation is front and center in this horror spoof, which tells the tale of a black hair salon in Brooklyn that becomes more and more frequented by white women intent on “sucking the lifeblood from black culture.”